Examination of Witnesses (Questions 140-145)
25 JANUARY 2005
MR DAVID
SIMPSON, MR
PETER WATT
AND MR
MARK PACK
Q140 Mrs Cryer: How well do you feel
the new regulations on making the register publicly available
are working? Is there evidence that electors are being excluded
or included in the "for sale" register as a result of
decisions made on their behalf but without their knowledge by
the householder who completes the current registration form?
Mr Pack: Our experience, because
we use the full electoral register for our purposes, is that we
do not really encounter those sorts of issues directly. In terms
of talking to returning officers about getting copies of the register
and how the system is working, in general I would say that my
impression is that there are no significant problems there, with
the important caveat that it is not an area we deal with directly
because we deal with the full register.
Q141 Mrs Cryer: You have no knowledge
of people being included or excluded by a householder against
their will.
Mr Pack: I could not name anybody
off the top of my head where that would be the case.
Q142 Mrs Cryer: None of you?
Mr Simpson: No, no direct knowledge.
Mr Pack: No.
Q143 Mrs Cryer: Mr Simpson and Mr Watt,
in your written submission you mention that the availability of
the marked register can help in detecting fraud. Mr Pack mentioned
it in his verbal submission this afternoon. How does that work?
How can we detect fraud from a marked register?
Mr Watt: This was the Information
Commissioner's evidence before and obviously we have had a lot
of conversation with the Electoral Commissioner about this. I
think there is a misunderstanding about what political parties
use the marked registers for. What we use the marked registers
for is (a) to make sure we do not speak to people who have already
voted on polling day, but (b) to make sure we are targeting our
messages because we have limited resources and limited time. A
by-product of that is that if we knock on somebody's door and
as far as we are concerned they did vote in an election and in
fact they did not, then if that happens frequently it is obvious
that people have been voting for people who did not know they
were voting, if you see what I mean. It is a very useful by-product
and not one which should be given up lightly. This is why we should
argue very strongly that the marked register should remain available
to political parties.
Mr Simpson: This is why we were
all particularly keen on making sure it was available to parties
in those regions in the European elections last year, where the
all-postal experiment was taking place.
Q144 Mr Beith: The Liberal Democrats'
evidence suggested some kind of additional information which could
usefully be included on the register, such as, something which
has always seemed to me rather odd, the returning officer deciding
whether you are known as Euphemia A Smith, a name you have hated
since childhood, or E Ann Smith, but also information which is
necessary to be able to communicate with electors using the Royal
Mail, because the Royal Mail set conditions like postcodes, which
are not on the register. The first of these can be done voluntarily.
Do you think an obligation should be placed on the compilers of
the register to include postcodes?
Mr Simpson: Frankly, yes.
Mr Pack: Yes.
Mr Watt: Yes.
Mr Simpson: I also think salutation
is desperately important.
Mr Pack: The salutation may seem
like a slightly esoteric issue, but in practice, if I were to
add up the number of complaints from members of the public which
I have had to deal with in the last year to do with use of marked
registers or tellers at polling stations or questions about the
full versus opt-out electoral register or the fact we are using
the register at all, they are all completely dwarfed by the total
number of complaints from people about us getting their names
wrong or getting their titles wrong. In terms of practical day-to-day
use of the electoral register, it is actually by far the most
important issue compared with a lot of other issues which often
take up a lot of time on investigations such as this. On the issue
of postcodes, certainly, yes. The other issue I would add, as
we said in our written submission, is that there is this inconsistency
particularly for military service voters in what the Royal Mail
requires for Freepost addresses to be delivered to them and the
information provided on the electoral register. It would be sensible
to remedy that.
Mr Beith: There is an impressive enthusiastic
agreement along the table.
Q145 Peter Bottomley: As I understand
it from the evidence we have heard, in some places, take Northern
Ireland pre-change, one voter in four was not eligible to be registered
and they had 126% registration. In some parts of the rest of the
United Kingdom you may have one voter in six not registered, which
is down to about 82%. Do you think we should be aiming for a perfect
system where nothing can go wrong, or do you think we ought to
aim over the next five to 10 years to achieve a significant reduction
in the wrongly registered and the non-registered and also make
some progress towards helping people to vote if they find it difficult?
Should we go for perfection or should we go for significant steps
to make the situation better?
Mr Watt: Personally I think we
should be going for significant steps to make it better. I come
back to what I was saying earlier about the Electoral Commission's
role here. I think the Electoral Commission, as an independent
body observing these things, is in a perfect position to set common
standards for what it thinks should be acceptable levels of registration,
voter participation; it can target each sector of society and
pick up issues, that certain groups have suddenly gone from being
well registered to not very well registered. The Electoral Commission
seems to me to be in a perfect position to be doing that and it
absolutely should be.
Chairman: On that note, may I thank you
all very much for your evidence and thank the Committee for their
attendance.
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